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The Wretched Atom book release
I am pleased to announce that my book, The Wretched Atom, was published this summer by Oxford University Press. I will post review snippets and other relevant information on this site. Head over to Amazon, Goodreads, or the OUP site to see more about the book. Here is a description: A groundbreaking narrative of how…
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Connecting to the Living History of Radiation Exposure
I’m pleased to announce a special issue of the Journal of the History of Biology (vol. 54, issue 1), which I have guest-edited with my colleague Linda M. Richards. It focuses on the history of radiation exposure, and it draws together stories of science, activism, art, culture, and struggles over historical narrative. It includes essays…
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“Aligning Missions” essay published in History and Technology
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07341512.2020.1863622 Jacob Darwin Hamblin, “Aligning Missions: Nuclear Technical Assistance, the IAEA, and National Ambitions in Pakistan,” History and Technology 36:34 (2020), 437-451. ABSTRACT Drawn from the archives of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the British National Archives, and other sources, the present essay analyzes nuclear technical assistance in central Asia, focusing largely on Pakistan. It…
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Downwinders Workshop: Making the Unseen Visible
I was delighted to co-lead (with Linda Richards) our final workshop for the OSU Downwinders Project this summer. It coincided with the 75th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Due to the pandemic, we had to cancel the flights of our visitors and conduct the workshop over Zoom. The silver lining on that…
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“An American Miracle in the Desert,” chapter published
“An American Miracle in the Desert: Environmental Crisis and Nuclear-Powered Desalination in the Middle East,” in Nature and the Iron Curtain: Environmental Policy and Social Movements in Communist and Capitalist Countries, 1945-1990, edited by Astrid Mignon Kirchhoff and J. R. McNeill (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), 205-218. On the book: In Nature and the Iron Curtain,…
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Ways of Knowing and Radiation Exposure
I’m delighted to be part of this Downwinders Project at Oregon State University. I’m posting the call for papers of an event to be held in June 2019, but please visit the site dedicated to that project too. Call for Papers Workshop: “Ways of Knowing and Radiation Exposure.” June 19-21, 2019 (Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday)…
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“Access Denied: The Continuing Challenge to Environmental Sciences in the Trump Era” essay published in Environmental History
Rogue science, Twitter wars, EPA Trojan horses, and of course, the man who wants to build The Wall. But there may be more important walls to consider, and the problem may be more long-lasting than we think. The journal Environmental History is running a forum of peer-reviewed short essays on history’s role amid political uncertainty.…
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Downwinders and Dose Reconstruction
I sent this email out today. Want to be involved in some way? Please get in touch. Friends and colleagues, Linda Richards, Anna Dvorak (PhD student in History of Science) and I have proposed a project to the National Science Foundation related to the Hanford Downwinders case, a controversial topic touching many lives in our region. It…
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Speaking at Princeton University on Environmental Transformation and Nuclear Reactors
Here’s the info for my talk at Princeton University on May 3, 2017, at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. ‘Water was Blood’: Environmental Transformation and Nuclear Reactors in the Middle East Jacob Darwin Hamblin, Oregon State University WEDNESDAY, MAY 3, 2017 – 4:30PM TO 6:00PM LOUIS A. SIMPSON INTERNATIONAL BLDG., RM. A71…
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Hamblin Wins the Davis Prize of the History of Science Society
I have scheduled this post ahead of time, because I can’t contain my enthusiasm, yet I’ve agreed to hold off talking about it until the prizewinners are announced. But I’m delighted to report that my book Arming Mother Nature has won the 2016 Helen Miles Davis and Watson Davis Prize, from the History of Science…
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Love Canal Across the Centuries
In the 1970s, residents of a Niagara Falls neighborhood realized that chemicals from a toxic waste dump had leached into their homes, parks, and neighborhood school. Their cancers, miscarriages, and myriad chronic ailments told the tale, and in 1978 they organized, filed lawsuits, and demanded intervention. The federal government eventually complied, evacuating the residents…
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Sustainable Development: the Painful Birth of an Idea
U.S. President George H. W. Bush captured the malleable meaning of sustainable development when he announced at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro that “to sustain development, we must protect the environment. And to protect the environment, we must sustain development” (261). Sustainable development might call to mind a managerial ethos similar…
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Scientists who Collaborate with the Military
A memorable scene in the 1983 film The Dead Zone provides an ethical justification for actions that harm innocent people. The protagonist presents his friend and psychiatrist with a well-worn hypothetical query: If he could travel back in time to pre-Nazi Germany, would he kill the young Hitler? His friend responds cannily, “I’m a…
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Hidden Consequences of Banning DDT
The sacred success story in environmental literature is that of Rachel Carson, who awakened America to the dangers of indiscriminate pesticide use, and led the charge to ban the sale of DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons in the United States. In her best-selling 1962 book Silent Spring, Carson introduced many readers to the concept…
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Remembering Ron Rainger, 1949-2016
At our graduate student conference in May 2016, I broke the rules of etiquette by checking my email on my phone, and instantly regretted it. It was news of Ron Rainger’s passing. Knowing that his illness had gotten worse, and that he did not have long to live, I expected the news. But it was still painful to…
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Getting Lost in the Woods
Yesterday I accidentally ran a trail marathon. It was a weird moment in which my personal life collided with my professional one in a roundabout way. Because I teach environmental history, and I direct our Environmental Arts and Humanities Initiative at the university, I am constantly aware of the huge range of experiences that people have…
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Does Our Obsession with Future Energy Demand Blind Us to History?
When I created H-Environment Roundtables in 2010, I hoped to generate some thoughtful discussions about books I wanted to read… a pretty modest aim! I did not anticipate how much I would learn, and how many fascinating people I would meet in the course of editing … let’s see… 32 of them! The first…
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Do we need to change how we recount the Lucky Dragon incident?
In “Beyond the Lucky Dragon,” Linda M. Richards and I make the case that we need to tell the story of thermonuclear testing a bit differently than in the past. The essay focuses on the influence of Japanese scientists upon a few key Americans in the aftermath of the 1954 Bravo shot (an American hydrogen bomb…
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Ronald Reagan’s Environmental Legacy
Before the end of his first term in office, President Ronald Reagan seemed to alienate, outrage, and motivate more environmentalists than any of his predecessors. His reforms, his bureaucratic strategies, and the people he put into positions of power all had the appearance of reversing the political successes of the environmental movement of the previous…
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The Atom does not wait for favors from nature!
Can the atom quicken the pace of evolution in order to feed a hungry world? The notorious Soviet scientist Trofim Lysenko used to claim (or shout) that real scientists don’t wait for random changes to happen. They don’t wait for favors from nature! Real scientists use tools and knowledge to shape human destiny! He wasn’t the only…
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Unexpected Links between Edward Abbey and Barry Goldwater
Environmental issues have not always divided people along party lines. Anyone who teaches American environmental history probably gets a kick out of bursting this bubble among students, when showing how many crucial environmental initiatives were initiated or backed by Richard Nixon, a U.S. president from the Republican party. Yet it is hard to ignore that…
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Are Cars the Ultimate Myth of Individual Choice?
One of historian Lewis Mumford’s many complaints about modern society was that compulsory action often posed as freedom of choice. In his 1970 book The Pentagon of Power, for example, he marveled at the free-loving, drug-taking, war-protesting hippies at Woodstock, who believed they were defying society’s expectations by acting out against the establishment. He thought…
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OMSI’s Reel Science: Planetary with Jacob Darwin Hamblin
Date: Apr. 22, 2015 Time: 6:30-9:30 p.m. Located at: Empirical Theater at OMSI Who is this for: All ages Cost: $7 non-members; $6 members Reel Science: Planetary with Jacob Darwin Hamblin, author and associate professor of history at Oregon State University Watch and learn at The Empirical Theater as OMSI highlights the science of documentaries on the big screen. Perfect…
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Is Maximum Sustainable Yield a Tool of Science or of Diplomacy?
For the world’s fish populations, the concept of Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) has stood for years as a working blend of economic goals and conservation principles. The word “sustainable” lends it a particular respectability in our environmental age. It purports to answer the burning question about how many fish can reasonably be taken from the…
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Environmental Battles on the Missile Range
Just west of Alamogordo, New Mexico, the site of the first atomic test in 1945, there is an enormous stretch of land that is off-limits to civilians, known as White Sands Missile Range. Since the Second World War, White Sands has been a notorious military proving ground. Not limited to any one armed service, the…
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Were National Parks Actually Mexico’s Best Idea?
On the eve of the Second World War, Mexico led the world in number of national parks. The Mexican government designated hundreds of thousands of hectares in fourteen states as national parks by 1940, during a time when the country was still recovering from the tumultuous revolution and civil war of the century’s second decade.…
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Arming Mother Nature wins Birdsall Prize
I am delighted to report that my most recent book, Arming Mother Nature: the Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism, was awarded the 2014 Paul Birdsall Prize from the American Historical Association. I was able to pick up the prize just after spending an incredible New Year’s eve and day staying in Times Square, the venue of the…
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Seeing the Oceans According to Our Values
My essay on how “seeing the oceans” has changed over time was published in the June 2014 issue of Isis. The title is “Seeing the Oceans in the Shadow of Bergen Values.” It begins with a discussion of how the oceanographer Roger Revelle is lionized today because of his role collecting data on the carbon…
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The IAEA demands nations open up to its inspectors, yet is itself a tightly shut box of secrets
By Jacob Hamblin, Oregon State University When we agree to send our young men and women to war, we expect the reasons why to be made clear. At least some of us will want to subject that explanation to scrutiny at the time, and often even more so with hindsight. That’s why having access to…
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The Wetlands Shall Rise Again!
The English language has not been kind to wetlands. We have swamps, bogs, quagmires, mires, and morasses. These are not words that call to mind productive landscapes. Such terms describe wet or inundated natural areas but they also double as metaphors for being stuck—-being bogged down, swamped with work, in a tangled morass of problems,…
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Plutonium Towns in the Cold War
Note: this is my contribution to an online roundtable on Kate Brown’s book Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford, 2013). The roundtable was published in H-Environment Roundtable Reviews 4:5 (2014). For the full roundtable, including Kate Brown’s response, click here. Few places encapsulate the concept of the Faustian bargain more…
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Grassroots Activism in the ‘Burbs
Suburbia is the Rodney Dangerfield of environmental history. It gets no respect. Cities are fascinating metropoles where cultures blend and clash, creating stories of great historical significance, while rural areas have the great appeal of being natural spaces of pastoral or wild beauty, raising perennial questions about land use and conservation. But suburbs? Blech. Christophers Sellers wants…
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War Against Nature, the Backbone of the South
You’ve heard the phrase “war is hell.” But you probably haven’t heard the phrase “war is when you attack agroecosystems.” It’s a lesser known aphorism of General Sherman’s, to be sure, mainly because he didn’t actually say it. But reading Lisa Brady’s book, War Upon the Land, made me wonder how much Sherman understood about…
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Roundtable on Arming Mother Nature
After editing a couple of dozen H-Environment roundtables myself, it was fun to have one of my own books, Arming Mother Nature, as the subject of one, this time guest-edited by Michael Egan of McMaster University. It was a great opportunity to engage directly with commentators. One of them, Dolly Jørgensen, recently featured my book…
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Endangered Species and Contested Lands
For most people, saving a critter from extinction is a laudable goal with a fairly straightforward action-item: don’t kill the animal. The 1973 the Endangered Species Act in the United States set forth guidelines for compiling lists of such species, such as the California condor. In practice, however, the law did not just establish a…
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Elusive Evidence of the Ocean’s Past
It’s fun to be a historian of the oceans these days. Environmental scholarship has yielded some fascinating clashes of perspective in recent years, and the conversations are lively. Scientists, historians of science, and environmental scholars are all working intensively to establish a narrative of the sea’s life forms, its physical and chemical conditions, and the impact of…
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My First Ultra—The Slippery Slope
Running the McDonald Forest 50k, this past Saturday, taught me a lot. About myself, the place I live, the forest, and about the people who are drawn to sign up for a 31-mile forest run. In my “real” life, I’m an academic historian. I teach history of science and environmental history at Oregon State, and…
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Does Crisis in Ukraine Shatter the Nuclear Order?
Ukraine’s inability to stop Russia from seizing Crimea may sound the death knell for the global nuclear order. For years I have written about the environmental dimensions of nuclear power and nuclear weapons programs, and more recently I have been exploring the connection between environmental crisis rhetoric and the proliferation of nuclear communities all over…
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Hydro Power and the Public Good
Driving eastward from Portland, Oregon, in the shadow of Mount Hood, it is easy to get the feeling of entering a gorgeous wilderness, away from human development. On the right, the verdant cliffs and hills of the Cascades. On the left, the wide Columbia River, flowing toward the Pacific. Depending on your mood, the scene…
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A Dr. Strangelove for All Seasons
Included here is my review of Audra Wolfe’s fine book Competing with the Soviets, which I read shortly after completing my own Arming Mother Nature. I mention this because the gloom I felt after writing my book may have fallen over me a bit while reading Competing with the Soviets. Although others have evaluated the…
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Agent Orange and the Burden of Proof
Included here is my review of Edwin Martini’s book on Agent Orange, originally published in Pacific Historical Review 83:1 (2014), 179-180. Agent Orange: History, Science, and the Politics of Uncertainty. By Edwin A. Martini. (Boston, University of Massachusetts Press, 2012. xvi + 302 pp. $24.95 paper) In this provocative book, Edwin A. Martini provides an international history of…
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Where is Nature in the Iconic Moments of American History?
If your New Year’s resolution includes reading more environmental history, you are in luck! A new installment of H-Environment Roundtable Reviews is available! This one focuses on environmental interpretations of iconic events in American history. My introduction is here: Should environmental historians confine themselves to subjects that clearly have environmental links, such as stories of…
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Can environmental scholars rethink Middle East history?
Surely there are too few environmental histories of the Middle East. With its distinctive landscapes and impressive features—the intimidating mountains of Iran, the nourishing rivers of Mesopotamia, the dangerous yet life-giving floods of the Nile, and the harsh deserts of North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, to name just a few—it is perhaps surprising that…
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Don’t Ever Whisper: The Marshall Islands Story
I was delighted to have Giff Johnson come to my class yesterday. It was bizarrely good timing. A fellow professor contacted me to ask if there was anything I was teaching that might be relevant to the radioactive fallout that afflicted the Marshall Islanders beginning in the 1950s. It turned out that Giff Johnson, husband…
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Mark Finlay, 1960-2013
Today I learned through the scholarly grapevine, specifically from my colleague Audra Wolfe, that historian Mark Finlay was killed last week in a car accident. My heart goes out to his family. Details can be found here and here. I’m sure Mark was missed this weekend in Portland, Maine, at the annual meeting of the Society…
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A Nobel Prize for Higgs and Englert: Another Blow Against “Real” Science?
Skipping over the experimentalists? Ernst Mach is rolling over in his grave. So are most of the Nazis. Let me explain. Even though the Higgs particle has been in the news over the past year because of the extraordinary work in Geneva at CERN, the Nobel Prize in Physics went to the scientists who first…
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Putting the Earth on a Ration Card
Is there such a thing as “world heritage” when it comes to food? We are outraged when an intolerant regime destroys artifacts, buildings, or other objects of cultural significance in their own countries, and we take steps to encourage them to realize their global importance. After all, these are the common heritage of humankind. But…
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Who are the Voices of the Mountains?
Throughout “Appalachia,” a vast mountain region stretching from northern Alabama to Quebec, it is easy to betray one’s outsider status. In many Southern parts, one might simply pronounce the third syllable in Appalachia with a long A, as in “name,” and it will be obvious to anyone that you are not from there. Instead, it…
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Environmental Legacy of the Limited Test Ban Treaty
We know that the treaty signed fifty years ago was an important arms control document. Was it an environmental document too? On the face of it, the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 seems like two giant leaps forward, for world peace and for diminishing the contamination of the earth. But the closer we look…
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The strange military origins of environmentalism
The words “environmentalism” and “military” are not typically found in the same sentence. Yet ideas about our vulnerability to environmental change are directly linked to military plans for a third world war. Scientists planned to fight an unconventional war using the potential threats of the natural environment, calling it “environmental warfare”. Envisioning major threats to…
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Jacob Darwin Hamblin 